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ORIGINAL: Lowlaner2012

I have not bought the game yet but its at 1st place on my X-mas list, could the battle generator used to simulate a campaign?

Cheers

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ORIGINAL: Adam Rinkleff

For what it's worth, you can create a pretty significant 'campaign' within a single battle. I'm currently approaching hour five of the battle for Schneverdingen (July 1991), and I still haven't made contact with the Soviet main force, which is entrenched on a ridge several kilometers away.

If you increase the map size and the number of units, you'll spend quite a bit of time just clearing out all the enemy scouts, listening posts, obstacles, minefields, machine gun nests, and bunkers, while redeploying your AA and AT assets to protect the advance from roving aircraft and opportunistic vehicles, while making sure you don't over-concentrate and expose your advance to enemy artillery. I've been averaging about a kilometer per hour, but I suspect it's going to get a lot slower once the shooting starts in earnest. I could have moved faster, but that would have been suicide with all those gunships that were floating around earlier in the day, while those bunkers would have just mowed squads down. They did enough damage as it was. I took out one listening post, and with their final report they called in an airstrike on my scouts.

Night is approaching, and that's going to further complicate the situation. I've only just breached the outskirts of the town, and will have to clear it out house by house, but the main position is on the hill overlooking the town. I suspect I'll start taking heavy fire once I near the city center. They've put pillboxes inside the buildings. I've tried heavy mortars, artillery, rockets, and bombs... flamethrowers seem to be the most effective means of clearing them out.

There aren't many wargames out there that include a complete approach and reconnaissance phase, while I haven't even maxed out the settings. With the right selection of terrain and units, you can create some lengthy engagements. I suppose if I lose this battle, I'll just play the same map and put myself on defense. If I lose that, I'll just slide the map over to the west and repeat until I win. Or if I win this battle, I'll just move the map a few kilometers further east.

[img]https://thumb.ibb.co/bABN4f/Untitled.gif[/img] [img]https://thumb.ibb.co/eq0oc0/Untitled3.gif[/img]

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ORIGINAL: exsonic01
I'm still looking for what might be the best map size - point price relation for "best experience" for such huge game. Maybe you could do your one too, or how about write AAR of that huge game. Screenshot looks amazing. Great work!

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ORIGINAL: Lowlaner2012

could the battle generator used to simulate a campaign?

Cheers

quote:

ORIGINAL: Adam Rinkleff
I would reccomend you start with the smallest map size. If you do that, and you pick 15 squads (around one company of infantry, with a couple of mortars, machine-guns, tanks, etc), you already have the basic setup seen in Close Combat. You could go smaller and limit yourself to a platoon, or even a squad. Anything larger than that is just as much complication as you can handle. Consider it a rank system, where you can be anything from a Sergeant to a Brigadier. Honestly, 50'000 points worth of infantry might be enough for an entire division.

I thought about doing an AAR on this one, but mostly I just wanted to try it out, but perhaps on the next one.

I think 'meeting engagement' battles should be avoided, in a real war you almost never have two armies approaching the same location for some random reason. You generally have one side already in defensive positions, and the other attacking. If you find yourself winning, just give the AI more troops. Like in a real war, your opponent may not have your skills, but they may have more troops. I also think its best to play without pausing, especially if you are winning.

I also try to set the objectives to logical locations (hill, crossroads), but I set the dummy objectives setting to the maximum. This gives common sense objectives on the map like you might expect to receive in your orders (ie: in my battle, objective 7 is a prominent hill), but because it's a dummy objective the AI might have a different plan than you expect and no two battles with the same map/force/objective will be the same because of random dummy objectives.

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ORIGINAL: zacklaws

One of the issues you will come up against if you try and do a large battle that will last for a day or longer, is the fact that you will run out of ammunition as resupply is not in the game as I found out beta testing AB when I tried to play very large scenarios. The work around is to have lots of reserve units including off map artillery that will come forward to replace those that have run out of ammunition. If you do not, then you will suddenly find that the game grinds to a halt as you have no ammunition left.